ModelMe...why?

My day job consists of architecting and maintaining several Rails applications. Some of these must deal with custom data sources that were architected before there were standards for inter-application communication (SOAP, REST, XML-RPC, etc). One in particular is is a custom TCP server that responds to method calls (using XML as the transport mechanism). Replacing the service is not an option (as is usually the case with any PITA legacy problem), so I have to communicate with it.

ActiveRecord/AREL

For all of its perceived shortcomings, ActiveRecord is an excellent piece of software. More importantly, arel, the relational library that drives it is a very well architected masterpiece. Together, they do a lot of magic that makes interacting with SQL data sources fairly effortless.

While arel allows for adding custom visitors (which allow you to customize the "SQL" generated to perform queries/updates), both libraries are tightly coupled to the RDBMS data store.

DataMapper

Another wonderful little gem is DataMapper. This thing solves the problems above by taking a different approach to modeling data. Instead of inferring structure from the database (as ActiveRecord does), it puts this responsibility back in the hands of the user. It also delegates the job of interacting with the data store to custom "adapters", which understand how to communicate with whatever thingie has the data you want. If you have to work in a mixed environment and can get away with it, DataMapper is definitely the way to go.

Stuck?

Unfortunately, I find myself stuck dealing with code that uses ActiveRecord to deal with the local application data, but still needs to be able to access data stored in the custom service described above. I could use DataMapper for just those areas of the app, but this just feels...dirty. As a developer, I have enough to think about. I'd rather not have to try and remember which DSL is used for which models. One application, one syntax for dealing with data. And it should just work.

ModelMe

After several attempts to bridge the gap, and digging around the source of several projects on Github (notably supermodel), I decided to just write some fucking code. The result is ModelMe. It's basically everything from ActiveModel I could squeeze in, with a lot of the relationship/query/association logic inspired by (read: stolen from) ActiveRecord. It follows the same methodology as DataMapper (explicit attribute definition/delegation of datastore interaction) but looks, smells, and tastes like ActiveRecord. It's fairly stable, and is currently being used in several mission critical applications dealing with financial data (yes, my sphincter puckers from time to time).

Is it perfect? Hell no. But it's good enough to get through the day.